Key quotations

Quotations reveal choices and changes

A useful quotation is more than a phrase attached to a theme. It belongs to a particular speaker at a particular moment. Macbeth’s words before Duncan’s murder reveal a man who can recognise evil and still choose it; his later words reveal the consequences of that choice. Lady Macbeth’s commands initially sound confident, but similar commanding language becomes helpless in her sleepwalking scene.

Begin with what the words mean. Then examine how Shakespeare makes that meaning dramatic: a revealing aside, a disturbing image, a repeated command or a change in rhythm. Connecting moments helps you build an argument about the play rather than a list of isolated techniques.

Eduqas asks two questions on your Shakespeare play. The extract question carries 15 marks and assesses response and analysis of language, form and structure: AO1 and AO2. The whole-play essay carries 20 marks for AO1 and AO2, plus 5 marks for AO4, covering spelling, punctuation, vocabulary and sentence structures. Neither question awards marks for context as a separate assessment objective. A brief contextual connection is useful only when it helps explain the text.

Macbeth: temptation, responsibility and insecurity

In Act 1 Scene 3, Macbeth calls the witches’ temptation “This supernatural soliciting”. “Soliciting” means urging or enticing: their prediction invites him towards kingship. His opposing judgements expose his confusion about whether the supernatural message is good or evil. The aside lets the audience hear thoughts concealed from his companions. The witches influence him, but his own imagination already turns towards murder.

By Act 1 Scene 4, Macbeth asks, “Stars, hide your fires”. The command to conceal his desires shows that he recognises their darkness. This matters because it comes before Lady Macbeth begins persuading him on stage: she strengthens his ambition rather than creating it from nothing.

In Act 1 Scene 7, “Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself” imagines ambition as an uncontrolled leap. Macbeth understands that reaching too far may cause a fall. His soliloquy gives the audience access to his moral reasoning, making the eventual murder a knowingly chosen betrayal rather than an innocent mistake.

The question “Is this a dagger which I see before me,” opens Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 2 Scene 1. The weapon makes his intended violence seem visible before he acts. One reading sees supernatural temptation guiding him; another sees his disturbed imagination producing the vision. His description of a “heat-oppressed brain” supports the psychological reading, while his sense that the dagger leads him supports the idea of an external influence. Either way, he proceeds towards Duncan.

Kingship brings no security. In Act 3 Scene 1, “To be thus is nothing; / But to be safely thus” means that being king seems worthless without safety. The repeated “thus” reduces his supposedly glorious achievement to a condition he cannot enjoy. His “fruitless crown” in the same soliloquy represents a kingship that he fears will produce no line of successors. The image connects with the prophecy about Banquo’s descendants: Macbeth believes he has sacrificed his peace for someone else’s dynasty. This fear helps motivate his plan to kill Banquo and Fleance.

In Act 3 Scene 2, the “scorpions” in Macbeth’s mind turn fear into an image of poisonous, stinging creatures. Ambition has not satisfied him: it drives further violence. After the banquet in Act 3 Scene 4, he declares, “I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far”. The extended metaphor imagines his murders as a river of blood through which he is wading. He argues that returning would be as difficult as continuing. This is his justification for further killing, showing how violence becomes a course he chooses to maintain.

Lady Macbeth: command, persuasion and limits

Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” in Act 1 Scene 5 asks the spirits to remove qualities she associates with womanhood, especially pity and nurture. This is a wish to become cruel, not proof that she achieves complete emotional hardness. Her later inability to kill Duncan because he resembles her father exposes a limit to that wish.

In the same speech, “Come, thick night,” commands darkness to conceal the murder. The adjective “thick” makes night seem like a physical covering; her subsequent reference to hell gives that concealment an evil association. Like Macbeth’s appeal to the stars, the command reveals awareness that their intentions must be hidden.

When Macbeth arrives, she warns him, “Your face, my thane, is as a book”. The simile suggests that other people can read his thoughts in his expression. She therefore instructs him to “look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't”. The contrasting natural images separate a welcoming appearance from a murderous intention. The serpent also carries associations with biblical temptation, sharpening the sense that hospitality is being used to conceal evil.

In Act 1 Scene 7, “When you durst do it, then you were a man” makes masculinity conditional on murder. She pressures Macbeth by redefining courage as willingness to kill. Her claim that she would have “dash'd the brains out” of her nursing baby if she had sworn to do so is a shocking hypothetical statement. It contrasts maternal tenderness with brutal violence, making loyalty to a promise seem more important than compassion. She uses this imagined act to shame Macbeth into keeping his commitment.

“screw your courage to the sticking-place” then imagines courage as something that can be tightened and held firmly. Her imperative attempts to replace his uncertainty with determination.

After the murder, “Infirm of purpose!” in Act 2 Scene 2 treats Macbeth’s hesitation as weakness or sickness. Yet the same scene contains her admission, “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done't.” The personal memory interrupts her ruthless pose. Shakespeare allows the audience to see both her practical control and the feeling she tries to suppress.

Guilt: blood and sleep connect the couple

In Act 2 Scene 2, Macbeth reports hearing “Macbeth does murder sleep”. Sleep is personified as an innocent victim. By killing the sleeping Duncan, Macbeth has also destroyed his own possibility of peaceful rest. Because he reports the voice himself, it can be read as his conscience giving its verdict.

His image of making “The multitudinous seas incarnadine,” means turning the vast seas blood-red. The hyperbole reverses the ordinary act of washing: instead of water cleaning his hand, his hand contaminates the world. Blood now represents responsibility that cannot simply be rinsed away.

Lady Macbeth’s response, “A little water clears us of this deed”, initially treats blood as removable evidence. The small quantity of water contrasts with Macbeth’s enormous seas. Their disagreement is about whether the murder can be managed practically or whether it has permanently changed them.

In Act 3 Scene 2, “Nought's had, all's spent” reveals Lady Macbeth’s private dissatisfaction. “Nought” means nothing: they have spent everything but gained no contentment. Its balanced opposites compress the failure of their ambition into a bleak judgement.

By Act 5 Scene 1, “Out, damned spot!” attempts to command imagined blood away. Earlier commands helped organise a murder; this command cannot control her own guilt. “damned” connects the stain with spiritual condemnation. Her further statement, “Here's the smell of the blood still”, makes guilt seem inescapable through another sense: she cannot merely stop looking at it. Her claim that even the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten her hand expands this into hyperbole, recalling Macbeth’s earlier fear that the oceans could not cleanse him.

Form makes these words work on stage

Most of the Macbeths’ early dialogue is in blank verse: unrhymed lines with an underlying rhythm of five unstressed–stressed pairs. That rhythm can carry sustained argument, but Shakespeare also divides verse between speakers. A shared line continues across different characters’ contributions, so separate speeches do not necessarily mean separate complete verse lines.

In Act 2 Scene 2, Lady Macbeth asks “Did not you speak?” Macbeth replies “When?”, she answers “Now.”, and he asks “As I descended?” These brief turns work within shared verse rather than becoming separate prose sentences.

Played rapidly, the exchange can show a couple closely responding to each other while trying to reconstruct what happened. Played with pauses, it can expose alarm and uncertainty. Their verbal closeness does not mean emotional agreement: Macbeth dwells on guilt while Lady Macbeth tries to control the situation.

The witches’ “Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” in Act 4 Scene 1 has a strongly stressed, chant-like rhythm. Its trochaic tetrameter generally uses four stressed–unstressed pairs, rather than the five unstressed–stressed pairs of iambic pentameter. Repetition and the rhyme of “trouble” and “bubble” distinguish their spell from the Macbeths’ usual blank verse. The sound makes the ritual feel collective and insistent.

Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” in Act 5 Scene 1 belongs to prose, not her earlier sustained verse. Prose has no regular verse metre. Abrupt commands, repetitions and shifts between memories convey fractured thought. Prose itself does not automatically mean madness—the Porter also speaks prose—but its contrast with her earlier speeches helps reveal her loss of control here.

Duncan, Banquo and Macduff provide contrasts

Duncan’s “There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face:” in Act 1 Scene 4 means that no reliable skill can read a person’s thoughts from their appearance. His “An absolute trust.” refers to the former Thane of Cawdor, who betrayed him. Macbeth then enters to receive Duncan’s praise. The sequence creates dramatic irony: Duncan recognises the danger of misplaced trust but remains vulnerable to another traitor.

Banquo warns in Act 1 Scene 3 that “The instruments of darkness tell us truths”. He understands that accurate information can be used to encourage a disastrous trust. Yet his hope for his descendants in Act 3 Scene 1 shows that he is not entirely untouched by temptation. The Third Witch’s “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none:” means he will father a line of kings, not become one himself. This promise threatens Macbeth’s hopes of founding his own dynasty.

Macduff supplies a different model of masculinity. In Act 4 Scene 3, after learning that his family has been slaughtered, he insists, “But I must also feel it as a man:”. His “also” refuses the idea that action and feeling must exclude one another. Unlike Lady Macbeth’s earlier pressure, his understanding of manhood makes room for grief and love.

Macbeth’s ending: despair, defiance and judgement

After hearing of his wife’s death in Act 5 Scene 5, Macbeth says, “She should have died hereafter;”. This can sound emotionally numb, as though death has become inevitable and ordinary. It can also express anguish at the timing: there should have been a future moment in which he could properly respond. The following reflections on time support both exhaustion and lost possibility.

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” repeats the promise of another day without offering progress or hope. The repeated conjunctions prolong the line; the following verb “Creeps” makes time seem painfully slow. Earlier, Macbeth imagined a glorious future. Now the future appears to be an empty succession of days leading to death.

“Out, out, brief candle!” imagines life as a small flame that quickly disappears. The repeated “out” gives death an abrupt finality. Macbeth’s subsequent comparison of life to an actor makes a connection with theatrical form: the audience watches a character describe existence as a temporary performance. His conclusion that it signifies nothing exposes the emptiness of the greatness he pursued.

In Act 5 Scene 8, Macduff reveals that he was “Untimely ripp'd.” from his mother’s womb: he was delivered by being cut out rather than by ordinary birth. The apparently reassuring prophecy about those born of women therefore has a hidden qualification. Macbeth finally understands the supernatural promises as equivocation.

Nevertheless, “Lay on, Macduff,” challenges his opponent to fight. Macbeth’s courage recalls the warrior praised at the beginning, but courage does not undo tyranny. Malcolm’s final phrase, “this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,” condemns their brutality. It is the victorious ruler’s judgement; the audience has also witnessed their fear, affection, hesitation and suffering. A thoughtful reading can recognise the justice of their defeat without reducing their tragedy to those labels alone.

A worked paragraph for the extract question

This paragraph practises the 15-mark extract question, focusing on how Macbeth and Lady Macbeth speak and behave in Act 2 Scene 2 immediately after Duncan’s murder.

Shakespeare presents Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as closely connected but frightened by the possibility of discovery. When Lady Macbeth asks “Did not you speak?”, Macbeth’s abrupt “When?” shows his need to establish exactly what she heard. Her reply, “Now.”, is immediately followed by his question, “As I descended?” The short contributions divide the verse between them, allowing a rapid exchange that makes their anxious checking audible to the audience. Their shared rhythm suggests that they respond closely to one another, but the repeated questions prevent the conversation from sounding settled or reassuring. Although Macbeth has completed the murder, he cannot confidently explain the noises around him. The audience may therefore feel suspense: the couple’s apparently successful plan has left them intensely vulnerable to every sound.

Quotation bank by character and theme

These 40 quotations give you a range of moments to connect. Cover the other columns to recall the speaker, place, theme and analytical point. Short fragments are useful when you can explain their situation and significance.

Recall the character journeys

• Macbeth: temptation → concealed ambition → murder → insecurity → despair → final defiance.
• Lady Macbeth: commanding persuasion → practical concealment → dissatisfaction → uncontrollable guilt.
• Duncan: misplaced trust makes him vulnerable to deception.
• Banquo: recognises supernatural danger but also hopes for his descendants.
• Macduff: combines grief with courageous action.
• Malcolm: condemns tyranny and promises restoration.

Connect the themes

• Guilt: Macbeth’s red seas contrast with Lady Macbeth’s little water; her imagined blood later overturns her confidence.
• Gender: Lady Macbeth makes murder a test of manhood; Macduff includes grief within manhood.
• Ambition: the dangerous leap becomes insecure kingship, a fruitless dynasty and finally despair.
• Deception: Duncan cannot read faces; Lady Macbeth instructs Macbeth to conceal his thoughts.
• Supernatural: Banquo warns that truth can deceive; Macduff’s birth reveals the prophecy’s double meaning.
• Time and death: Macbeth’s hoped-for future becomes monotonous days and a brief flame.

Remember form and structure

• Aside and soliloquy: expose private thoughts.